How Yale fits in.

I have been getting to know Yale in the past weeks. Not well, mind you, but indirectly. In a way you might get to know a friend of a friend.

We have had Yalies working in out office, and I have started to recognize the facade of Yale buildings as I drive along chapel Street and Whalley Avenue. I have met several of the university's professors through canvassing.

I was recently reading from a biography of John Kerry. It was written by staff members from the Boston Globe. They apparently know the man well, from his time of public service in the state of Massachusetts. I imagine they know him fairy well for his policies, but apparently they have been getting to know his fellow classmates and friends over the years as well.

I read the chapter on his life at Yale, probably because I was most interested in the time of life in which Kerry would be my peer.

There may be nothing terribly significant about this chapter of Kerry's life, except that it set up a great deal of what is in the news today.

First, George W. Bush was at Yale at the same time. One of Kerry's friends recalls the two meeting and debating the busing system in place to integrate schools. Kerry officially denies any recollection of the meeting, but it would be an interesting point of history if it did happen.

Kerry was in constant debater. It seems that he spent most of early life looking for, and going deep into debates. It seems that Kerry would incessantly fight over each side of an issue, for weeks at a time, before settling on an opinion. It seemed to me to be mirrored in his recent acceptance speech, when he recognized the fact that there were great complexities to the issues facing our country, and that they deserved time of thoughtful decision-making, instead of stalwart and unyielding opinion.

Kerry was a member of a secret society called the Skull and Bones. It seems that this group was a fraternity of 15 men who were selected by the previous upperclassmen for their potential for success in their future. It was thorough this group that he would be persuaded to go to Vietnam. One of his fellow Bonesmen's father told Kerry and his friends that they were needed in a place like Vietnam. Kerry followed his brethren into the service, later on after graduating. There he met and served with a different kind of fraternal order.

Kerry went to Yale in the footsteps of his own father, and had always dreamed of the place. He was constantly raving about the university, apparently to the dismay of his roommates and classmates. At the time, Yale was making radical changes, turning itself into a gothic mecca of enlightened persons. It was apparently being transformed to a place where students would feel a sense of privilege.

To this day, it still has that aura, and it has a much more interesting one for me, with the knowledge that this was the place where this year's two candidates once studied.

If you are interested in reading for yourself, the book is called John F. Kerry by Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney, & Nina J. Easton